The Impact of Having Esports Events Without an Audience PG Connects Digital #2

James Dean the fantastically name James Dean do I need to unmute you either let me home you you hello can you hear me James yes hi you're in an empty arena there exactly I just I figured you know we should try and get the vibe of this arena that was very cool very cool well you've got you know you do have to catch some more I'm regularly okay um I've kind of weird on a bit too much so I don't want you'll get your full times you've got you know an easy sort of 20 minutes and you get the chatting and then we'll try and get some questions after so I'm gonna now disappear in hand you the floor to talk about the impact

of eSports events without an audience okay brilliant thank you um so I hopefully my screen is sharing correctly so I'm just jumping in because I thought I'd start with them quite an apt picture so this is a real event this was IEM katowice obviously we were mid sort of about to launch the event back in March and just as the lock downs were announced and the Polish government decided that there would be no physical audience but of course everyone was already there the production the teams you name it so this is um it was quite a spooky situation you've obviously got some staff wandering around and that sort of thing but but obviously post that we move very quickly to an entire online situation so just to start on the primary impacts and first of all and we

have to play entirely online starting with ESL one la it was quite a tricky process really because obviously there's quite a lot of stakeholders involved and just to actually conduct the tournament and play in the tournament of course which is the team so huge amount of reorganization and there was a format change as well because um you know we're dealing with teams coming from all over the world so it's not just a simple case of just running exactly the same tournament format as as we have normally done in a physical space first of all impossible for players to come together you know government restrictions it's largely unsafe so we want to encourage it either way and and there was a lack of travel option anyway you know dealing with an international market you know particular games will attract teams and players from

particular countries and obviously that that gives us quite a challenge um there's also a bit of contention around talent now this impacted where we had actually in effect host the tournament I mean its online only but of course we still have to create the content and produce it etc so we you know working in a global sphere we have offices all around the world and different countries have different rules so we had to really you know figure out which is the best country to actually operate each tournament so so you we just had ESL one Birmingham and the production was done out of the US because we can get the talent into the UK so it's a bit of a strange one really it was still calling yourself on Birmingham but basically it was out of a studio in the United States and you know

that I guess we have to really sort of dynamically change as and when I think the decision there was made a week before we were going live believe it or not because there was so much to be reorganized etc I just thought I'd touch on the sort of the negative impact on on business too you know largely we're fortunate as an industry that we could continue forward and you know we just heard from a previous speaker there are marketing dollars coming through to the industry I wouldn't say would be as fluid as it would be before a lot of companies that will just be gone down on a bit of a lockdown state themselves you know protection mode to some degree but directly without having a physical event we're going to halt and lose out of the obvious ticket sales merchandise sales on on-site food and beverage and lots of other revenue and they just you know generally hurts the local economy

anyway and then on the b2b side of things largely I'm sure many of you into eSports has been to an ESL event before but we we tend to have a very point b2b networking space which always is the initial start or continuance or the opportunity to sign some new contracts etc and I think people are really missing that because you know it's just generally the course of business that said meanwhile there are positives and I just mentioned just briefly on merchandising front and you know we actually saw a huge uplift in online merchandise sales and we also created the kind of event pack so if you're watching from home you could buy an event pack and you know spread a load of ESL goodies and dota goodies or whatever you know in your living room and but the

big thing is the viewership the viewership has gone through the roof twitch itself has reported record numbers I think it was 1.7 million concurrent during violent launch we ourselves have have seen massive numbers growth of online audiences obviously there's a bigger target audience captured audience that are probably missing some live entertainment or or some live competitive competition so we're in doubtedly going to see something but we are seeing in region of two and a half times the increase and I'll go into that for a second so I wanted to just touch on an event we just recently ran called road to Rio now Rio was one of what was going to be an incredible event rio is well-known for a very

excitable audience and an extremely passionate and large audience and this was going to be a csgo major which meant there was it was quite anticipated to put it bluntly we had to move very very quickly to change this obviously it lost its major status but there's a lot of stakeholders at play here the teams need to be playing and they got to try and get as much exposure for them themselves as a business as well as obviously as a tunnel operator as getting you know the the tournament running and a viewership in and so we basically iterated on the on the format and came up with something pretty special it was certainly first ever csgo tournament in it of its kind in all the years professional CS has been running and it became the largest

global ESL tournament as well with the total of 56 teams playing over 44 nations and 25 days of play which would all lead to basically a finals and then you know there's there's lots of coverage here so I encourage anyone to go and check it out and you know there was not much time those four weeks to iterate on this and get it all all ready to go and it really was you know to try and fill that void for jus to cope in nineteen and the impact etc and you know the it became a culmination of what we were doing for Pro League and of course the major - so the prize money was pretty decent there's some technical challenges too of course one thing for certain with that number of matches we had to have consistent overlap in play so we had to figure out ways in which we

could a activate our global production so handing off from Australia to to Germany for a start in order to you know I don't think anyone is keen on doing 24/7 shifts and then of course running parallel matches so a bit like a you know Soccer Sunday where you're you're diving in and out of different play and trying to highlight it takes a huge amount of work and effort especially in four weeks to figure out how to do that really well and just to touch on the numbers and you know these these are incredible and put this in perspective so 140 million video plays and that's for effectively this one tournament if we were to compare you know that that's almost as much as the entire pro league season that which is a huge amount of weeks of play and then

you know using the new statistic you know for the average minute audience and you know again compared to an entire season of pro league with almost hitting that just with one tournament and then finally just the hours watched obviously you know hitting almost 40 million it's incredible stats it's just a shame someone wasn't paying as a penny for every one of those and then the social media we also saw a huge uplift across impressions engagement and video views etc and the reason we're comparing an IM there is the IM katowice tends to be a multi game event so there's lots of different tournaments going on at the same time it's almost like a festival of eSports so so actually seeing you know

getting almost double the amount of cattle it series is incredible and you know I mentioned the teams as big stakeholders that's really really crucial just a quick note from mousesports here if if we were to stop the tournament for whatever reason commercial reasons or or other restrictions that's good to be a big problem and so we were very pleased to get a lot of positive feedback from the teams themselves and you know appreciating that we could as much as possible run as well as usual now I also want to just quickly touch on Weaver and Weaver as a reminder for those people have been to poppy gaming before he's a government funded project of 5.8 million and coded 19 actually was quite sound it's a situation for for this project because the project is

looking at how we engage with audiences virtually so what better time to try and accelerate the project and in fact UK government also saw this opportunity and encouraged us to figure out our financial woes and some of our challenges going into the lockdown and in how we can really accelerate some of the aspects of this project so as a year so one was going into an online state we really wanted to explore some key innovations and that we'd already started on but get them really in place and so first of all was a virtual set second and I'm going to go through these in slightly more detail companion app so you can screen app for the first time at which integration and then also iteration on the talent tools which obviously is now a distributed amount of talent and v4 contributing to this big

production and we also explored three other areas we kind of looked as additional options of maybes one VR experience we certainly saw a huge uplift in in VR headsets over the lockdown period I think it was very well I certainly saw every shop selling out of oculus and vibes and and obviously normally a VR experience would be within a stadium to kind of get mini atmosphere but obviously we don't have that but we do have a virtual set so we actually explore ways in which we could put audiences into that that production facility into the set next to the talent talking and looking at all the assets that the talent are using to to watch the match etc I'm also looking at the data side it's very important how do we modernize that and offer it out to a wider kind of

number of platforms because they can all benefit from from this situation too and of course how do we look at getting better feeds from the the players and the teams themselves know whether their home or a team office can we position 360 cameras and kind of get an idea of where and how they're playing etc to bring a bit more of that human aspect to to the production and we work with Doc 10 on the Virtual Set the bass book in Manchester immediate city they are the UK's leading televisions facility and more recently they've invested a huge amount in their virtual set technology which is unprecedented certainly across Europe and we we started to explore ways in which we could use the Virtual Set in not just do I say gimme keys basis or a nice-lookin basis and how we actually

drive real data analytics into that space so obviously they are producing for the BBC and and and their show would match for the day and we also looked at how we could use it for creating painting highlights etc so at the moment based on the talent situation that's all parked and ready to go forward for our next event we hope and this is an idea of of what things look like you know we've got a 3d map which is completely interactive we've got the talent obviously sitting there real talent and we can pull in feeds from from any source even the players on the team as etc so this was a really exciting part our second screen app was in our third iteration basically to act as a kind of a second data feed if you like a narrative so you can follow the matches

setting with three hundred three hours of content you're not going to see it also getting an idea of what's going on in the meantime is is more than more important than any and the analytics dashboard which was tailored to have a more distributed kind of work basis so people could analyze what was going in the match wherever they were in the world without having to log into computers etc and whether they were remote talent or what someone working on social media or whatever they could log in and see what's going on statistics wise this was a brand new the twitch integration hadn't been done before and I'm cautious of my running out of time so when try to speed up a little and the the extension we introduced fairly last minute again and we actually got this live for ESL one Birmingham what it

allowed us to do was really show have a layered showing the statistics and the ongoing schedule of the tournament itself and the results of that are extremely interesting without going into too much detail we haven't released them yet but we the interaction was in the millions and with with repetitive you know user interaction so people coming back over the three days we had it running looking at the statistics delving into some of the details etc and this was all for dota 2 obviously we're now exploring csgo for that but for for this so just as finish and I thought I'd finish on some key takeaways obviously embracing change is absolutely imperative trying to make a positive of that change has been very

important fortunately with an eSports not only is it nice growth industry but there's a lot of passion of people wanting to see it grows so people do pull in you know put in the extra work and hours to really try and figure out what we can do and I think also with that change comes innovation and and how we can pivot around particular workflows you know we're we're creatures of habits we don't like change but you know if we do see a benefit in something I think we do embrace it really well and I do believe that there's a lot of changes that we've made during this lockdown which we will remain implemented and we also look altom utley excuse me those long-term benefits both commercially for our products ourselves for the brand or a

tournament for our teams and on players and for the people who work to to to make things happen and so hopefully I'm not doing too badly on time at 21 minutes so James that was fantastic that was that was a slicker to expect from James Dean um I'm not too much of it and I thought I was gonna make a pearl in the reference for my season I'm so far I'm so far behind the carefulness um that was great really insightful and the numbers never ceased just a quick date you in there oh if you lost me yeah you're back just we okay sorry that's fine oh no okay um anyway yes guess kid gets kids before I go into the questions in the from the floor as it were I got a

question it was something that always it occurs to me and maybe it's an age thing I kind of said that in the question but for me the structure of eSports still feels quite kind of convoluted and slight confusing to an outside person I'm not a complete sauna but I understand the games industry it feels just cuz I you know I'm very engaged in football and tennis whatever and and it just there's much older sports to get it but they're just you know you know you've got Lee you're either into the NBA you into the Premier League or whatever you picture team in there where's eSports Fields always feels much more kind of from fragmented and my question really is that just because I'm the wrong generation and young people don't care about that or was it just because it's still so young that this stuff's kind of evolving no I think what you're seeing the effects of actually increases is that obviously every single IP that we structure eSports ecosystem is about the actual game itself of

commercial entities so naturally you know each commercial entity is going to structure a different kind of ecosystem franchise system whatever and to ultimately encourage people to play their game and buy their game and and pay for things and obviously they're looking for you know an increased number of people playing ultimately and also you know a retained user base as well which all leads to that all-important revenue and we're seeing their models really change within the gaming industry specifically and so depending on which game you're looking at the tournament structure will be more fragmented than others and some are franchise and will semi franchise them are just completely open for anyone to do what they can so so really it's about the fact that

there's always this kind of third stakeholder so ESL is a torment operator we have to kind of decide what is the structure what do we think is the best foot forward you know each game that we adopt and which which group of teams we're working with what the open level of formats are which level of professionalism does it reach and we try to encapsulate it all on a global level but no one company can ever do that so there has to be competition out there but ultimately know those IP owners they can pull the plug or they can it's like you know you can't take the football the lawyer I mean I suppose EFA could yeah exactly nope fair enough so I guess that's just the nature of the beast that's what we're saying it's a pretty unanswerable question just it just it feels it's such a huge thing but I try and work out I see so many different tournaments going anyway I guess gives you specific

questions in come on so I think it'd be quite quick and then maybe going to Cuban generals um is the Weaver is Weaver still open to companies or is it a closed project no it's absolutely and so Weaver is a consortium and so there's no legal entity behind it we was just the name of the project and it's an R&D project that is funded by the UK government so if there are companies certainly British ones the government really like that but also international companies looking to I guess that they can take advantage of what we've what we've learned and found over the process we are very very open and so you hop over to the Weaver dot TV website and just use the contact that that goes to myself and one of the other program directors and you know we're very excited to talk to more you know

people interested in that space that's the exact in point of it no specific question how are you expecting to work with partners on dock what kind of partners you looking for so I think largely what we've seen is and the certainly use a case of ESL that I guess the origination of this question was that ESL would naturally just need everything ourselves but that's largely because either the budget wasn't there or no one did it so we ended up being this torment operator / production company / events organizers / you name it we were everything obviously as a company grows that is not sustainable way of doing things so I think it's all but natural that we find production partners or anyone else in the space that can basically help us obviously we

do need to have a certain level of resources we have a very large production hub based in Poland which there's a lot of our global production work etc but it needs to open up and we do need to start partnering with with any sort of facility usually the barrier tends to be either the budgets aren't quite there yet or the actual scheduling because funnily enough a lot of existing Productions videos TV production studios and the stuff we watch live Chris on TV isn't actually live and so with these funds so we don't run a magic for me so yeah that's one that's one of the challenges there so apart from the productions videos there's lots of other agencies that we work with on an increasing capacity and we have some

really good partnerships there and you know obviously always looking for new ones and I think that's a lesson to learn you know from the industry at home that it's got to be a collaboration okay I've got I'm we're trying to squeeze three questions into one last question here and so because they're kind of broadly related a couple of mentioned kind of numbers that mentioned you mentioned 1.7 million concurrent viewers for particular its ornament you mentioned two and a half times the growth in a engagement of something in Kobe it someone said you had no anyway so I guess the one question is how big can this get how big can eSports care the second part is do we expect has Co vids as Co vids the change is forced by kovat actually IV can become more permanent and because somebody said here they might actually be improved or raised eSports to a different level I don't that's true that's some else's opinion um and final part of that is is are you seeing changes as we come out of

lockdown already was it too early to it because some countries have come out further earlier than others we're seeing the mobile games data for instance might be bit early for eSports to see the impact only yes sure absolutely say you know boy I'm Troy do you three things at once yeah that's good the so on the audience site and I think first I think it's really interesting as of late last year Nielsen introduced a new metric for eSports a may average minutes audience that you know that what that does it defines you know the the overall kind of audience average audience figures per minute during the length of the tournament because you it's very difficult to compare from one eSport to another or at one event to another and one hour long tournament might do pret quite well but it would look complete rubbish compared to you know a year long

season of of another eSport that might have had a quite a mediocre audience so um so I think that's really important the other to ransom growth I think the growth will continue I don't know exactly you know what the way I see it coded is that it's just accelerated that growth this growth was always going to come but it's just happened a lot quicker maybe we would be seeing numbers like this sometime mid next year but instead we saw them now because everyone's here now what happens is is that people watch this turf they they start talking about it and their friends and it just grows the TAM in effect so maybe there will be a bit of a drop-off as people get back to work in school and college and university etc but I think it will keep growing back up to that level again maybe a bit sooner this time maybe towards the end of this year instead and then it will continue

growing in surpassing past that and I think just a note around the games as well you know a new game comes along and I've been saying this for years a new game comes along it brings in all these new players and new viewers etc and we all think wow this is the game but there will be and I guarantee you another game that comes along with even more players and even more viewers yeah and we're seeing that right now in Valerie just before it was full night we were talking about before that was Pope Jean before that was overwatching before that war it was a you know so many other games so and also the town is increasing because at the end of the day the people watching eSports now are getting older and older there I say I'm 39 this week which is a bit scary Harold the trials and but then of course you know the the people that were watching minecraft are now watching overwatch tournaments and all sorts of

course the gens ease of coming through so I have a tune off here oh he's not quite into eSports just yet but he's certainly watching plenty of stuff on YouTube and he'll be in the new generation so so I think it's inevitable and what what isn't predictable is how what the structure is exactly you know and and we can see that so there's always movement within the industry but and then just on that final point about the changes and absolutely we will adopt some of the changes and ways in which we've iterated during this process of change with the lockdown we found lots of efficiencies we found new ways of interacting with audiences as using Weaver I think this will just don't continue and and in a way it's been a bit of a you know a fresh start to some degree not a great reason for one but maybe we can learn from that excellent I'm gonna have to pass you on

there and send you to the digital ether but thank you so much the 'seeing they flew in yeah look forward to it so watching Maury sports with my 9 Ewell's right into it so I shall be a bit miss my peak as a player I can tell you what all right thanks James thanks you